> > Is there interest in massive applications in general?
>
> Massive but not rediculous.  Perl and java are useful but
> large.  A LEAF box with them gets closer and closer to
> being a full distro, minus the x-windows.  Certainly
> the user would need a cdrom based LEAF.  I'd like to
> see java2, but only the jre.  God only knows how well
> that'll work on a crippled Linux box :)

I'd like to see how small this could get as well.  Java was initially
intended to run on embedded systems, but got co-opted for internet use due
to it's "run anywhere" nature.  Ideally, I'd like to see something small
enough to be included by default on all releases, even floppies.  In the
"good old days", you could run a forth interpreter in a couple of K...it
seems like a run-time virtual machine *should* be able to fit on a floppy,
especially since we've already got the glibc libraries to do most of the
"grunt work".

My goal with a JRE/interpreter/virtual machine would be to make *really
small*, yet powerful programs, enabling things like a comlex package
manager, configuration system, web configuration/status magaer, etc.  The
programs would be edited & compiled on a development system, and only the
binary or "byte-code" would actually be required.  The point of useing a
virtual environment like Java would be to save space overall...you have to
add the size of the run-time interpreter, but you can do powerful things
with small amounts of code.

Java seems like a good choice, if the basic JRE can be made small enough,
but it's not the only choice.  The existing ash shell is a good example of
one possibility, but it's lacking a bit of power/flexability.  There are
many other scripting languages that are possible candidates.

Charles Steinkuehler
http://lrp.steinkuehler.net
http://c0wz.steinkuehler.net (lrp.c0wz.com mirror)



_______________________________________________
Leaf-user mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user

Reply via email to